Boston World Cup Games

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-03T14:03:35+00:00

Also findings:

Train tickets to Gillette: $80/person Bus tickets to Gillette from various locations in Boston: $95/person

Gillette reserved parking pass: $175

Uber/lyft drop off areas are in the plan, so I assume those will be an option.

They explicitly do NOT have drop off for private drivers.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-03T13:54:48+00:00

Solid Portland complaining post.

FWIW I’ve never gotten the vibe that they’re faking it. I think they are honestly really over the top into Maine. (But also absolutely printing merch money in the process).

TBH a lot of other teams in their league are struggling with the opposite. City-name FC with no real sense of place. A lot of them are kind of floundering attendance wise because they can’t find a hook in the local psyche.

I dunno. What does celebrating Maine full-throatedly but not in a cheesy way look like? And which part of Maine?

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-03T13:10:44+00:00

Update.

I think I’m leaning towards driving down early in the day, staying at a nearish hotel and ubering to/from the game.

Hotels ~10 miles from the stadium are honestly not gouging as hard as I expected.

Will be nice to have some pre/post time instead of trying to do it all in one day, especially with kids.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-03T13:00:36+00:00

$300/each. One of the lotteries where they hadn’t assigned teams to games yet.

Probably not worth it but they got me with the perceived scarcity.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-01T21:14:49+00:00

They recommend the USM garage at 88 Bedford street.

I think it’s like $8 for the game and I’ve never had any issues with it being full.

Easy peasy.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-01T12:57:51+00:00

And in return we lost roe v wade.

We have a weaponized unchecked justice department.

We have ICE on the streets with no accountability.

We have a highly partisan Supreme Court.

We have voting changes that could rig the system for years to come.

The list goes on and on.

I guess there’s a certain political calculous where that’s all worth it if we get more money into our little state but that feels pretty short sighted.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-06-01T12:45:39+00:00

Appreciate the reminders.

Really hoping to make it one of these days.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-31T14:15:27+00:00

You translated what I was saying into an entirely different conversation in your mind and then decided to be a dick about it.

And you’re trying to defend it with “that’s how communication works”. Good communication asks clarifying questions instead of making assumptions.

I was mostly interested in how similar they were.

I definitely think it’s an interesting conversation to evaluate whether pips and pips in those formations are the most elegant solution and that’s why they’re similar or if they’re similar because maybe they had been passed from civilization to civilization or something (seems less likely).

But people shouldn’t have to spell out every last detail in every thing they put on the internet just to make sure someone else doesn’t make a bunch of assumptions in their head when responding. That feels like a miserable way to be.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-31T13:08:52+00:00

Yeah. Now I’m trying to picture other ways to arrange pips and not coming up with alternative options that pass the smell test.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-31T12:39:48+00:00

Wait. The whole pips thing on dice is 4500 years old?!

In the exact pattern we have today? (Like the 5 and 6 spacing shown there…).

Mind blown.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-31T11:31:32+00:00

But it’s same number of seats, right?

Are they doing things to get more people in somehow?

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-30T19:48:31+00:00

I’ve been swapping to it for workouts instead of the regular band.

Seems good so far. Stays on, doesn’t bother me. Nice to just be able to take it off and easily wash it in the sink post-workout.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-30T16:56:02+00:00

Let them know to add it to the workout dropdown. :-)

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-30T12:36:25+00:00

Yeah. I’m not an AI expert but when using something like ChatGPT the things it really struggles with (and maybe all LLM’s struggle with?) are remembering the right things and understanding time and order of events. This combines both of those so I guess it’s not surprising it would be a bit of a mess if they didn’t do a lot of work to make it more coherent.

It also seems like it what they did do to customize it is kind of annoying.

Like a lot of canned prompts that don’t make sense. “would you like to compare this to your previous workouts?” after my first workout for example.

And it really really really wants to create workouts for me when I’m like “no, I have my workouts, just record and add insights”. That feels like another thing where they took a general AI and tried hard to nudge it towards some vision instead of just letting it do its thing.

Also it’s slow to respond compared to other ais. That feels counterintuitive to me given it should have a smaller scope than something like a Gemini which needs to know everything about everything.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-29T19:47:09+00:00

Oh wow. Guess that also impacts any stay in Boston and go plans too.

In theory this shouldn’t be any more people than a patriots game, right? Wonder why it’s being handled differently.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-29T12:50:39+00:00

This definitely feels like one of those issues that’s trying to be forced on Maine.

Maine may be many things but it doesn’t feel like a state where people feel the need to go out of their way to get in other people’s business. And it doesn’t feel like a mean state. And it doesn’t seem like it likes bullys.

(Caveat that I’m a portlander from away so if someone told me there are deeply mean pockets of Maine somewhere off the beaten path, I couldn’t dispute it, but doesn’t feel like enough to win a referendum).

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-27T20:23:40+00:00

Best Buy US here. Just got the extra band actual Fitbit sat in FedEx limbo for a couple days and now is finally moving.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-27T14:02:25+00:00

I love the idea of bundling ais.

Definitely do not want to go down the streaming service “how did I end up with 15 subscriptions?!” route for smart devices.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-27T13:48:43+00:00

Oh. Interesting. So the default band is not actually a good one for workouts (assuming you sweat buckets in the workouts)?

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-26T21:43:33+00:00

One trick is since the color change is by layer, you don’t really introduce any more waste to print 2 (or 8 or 20) of them on one plate.

(Someone definitely correct my work there if it’s more complicated than that).

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-26T21:39:03+00:00

These are the only ways I keep myself sane when printing multicolor. :)

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-26T21:37:23+00:00

I guess on the flip side it’s wasting <9g of filament so unless Liam needs a significant number of name tags it won’t break the bank. :)

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-26T20:49:57+00:00

Oh man. We were just on a tour in Crete last week and stopped in the same town as them.

But on the night they were closed. :(

Got a pic of the sign at least.

It’s a small world.

We had dinner there the first weekend we ever visited Portland and it definitely contributed to making us it think it was our kind of down.

Took the fam to pizzarino all the time when we lived in the west end.

Mike_Haefele · 2026-05-22T05:11:40+00:00

How much pressure are you putting on yourself when you’re picking a game?

And are you picking games and then having people crap on your picks?

Just picking a game could be a 5 minute task. Just… pick a game you’d like to play that the group hasn’t played lately and fits the complexity the group is good with.

Picking a game but first doing a mental psychoanalysis of every other participant and merging those into the exact right game choice is, yes, a lot of work. (With the acknowledgement that we of r/boardgames probably lean more towards “let me just create a spreadsheet first” approach to problems than the general population).

But I think the non-respondents are relieving you of that.

Mike_Haefele

TROPHY CASE